Qt: Bootstrapping openness

Jul 21, 2010 • Robin Burchell

I witnessed (and was pleased to take part in) some interesting discussions on #qt-labs this afternoon, all stemming from a contribution to Qt3Support being rejected.

A long story short, the contribution - despite looking reasonably valid - was rejected because Qt3Support is effectively unmaintained, and as a result, any changes to it could have negative impacts on users of the support API.

I understand that argument, yet at the same time - I can't help but think it's a bit of a backwards approach to be taking. Typically, a contributor will wander along, find a bitrotting module/project that interests them, throw patches at the previous maintainer - and shortly after doing so, find themselves a de-facto (or indeed official) maintainer through their efforts.

This is a natural progression of things and should really be encouraged, it allows what would otherwise be dead code to live on. However, in Qt3Support's case, the central point was that they'd love someone else to take responsibility for it, but don't want to expend the effort themselves to triage, maintain, and otherwise support it right now.

To me, it's a false saving.

Time you save not maintaining it now (and encouraging potential contributors/future maintainers along the way) is spent being forced to put the code on life support maintenance if you decide you want that code, for whatever reason, later on.

Not to mention that those people who might be happily contributing you ideas or patches (to code old and new) are instead going to be spending their spare time doing something more rewarding than having their hard work rejected in the future.

Openness doesn't just happen overnight. It isn't just in the licensing. It requires real persistent effort and culture change. This is something I plan to keep revisiting over my next few posts.

{Note}: Before commenting, please note that this issue isn't *just* based around Qt3Support. That is one example of the problem, yes, but the patch was actually to QWorkspace which actually wasn't part of Qt3Support, and QtSql is in a similar boat - and there is nothing to port code using QtSql *to*.

The thoughts and opinions of an open source & mobile gadget enthusiast who ran away from Australia and is now surviving in the middle of nowhere in Norway while learning how to love snow, ice, and all things Scandinavian.